I have always had a love affair with stationary. I love paper stores the way a lot of other people love candy stores. I have an entire map on my phone that is solely paper stores in Toronto. If you ever want to know where to get the best wrapping paper or washi tape I am your girl. So it makes a lot of sense that I, perhaps ironically given I’m now officially a “blogger”, mourned the death of the letter.

Thankfully, stationary is making a HUGE come back. I can point you to a couple of my favourites in the city, but if you have Instagram and are as obsessed with checking out invitation suites you HAVE GOT to start following @dabneylee, @prettysmitten, @sugarpaperla, and @smittenonpaper just to name a few of our fave inspirations right now.

a super cute example of gorgeous and classy stationary from Minted

One of the most important pieces of stationary you should carry with you are thank you cards. I keep a box of my current faves (found at the Paper Place on Queen St W by Trinity Bellwoods park for any Toronto dwellers!) on my desk at all times. Even if I’m not using one they remind me it’s always important to show people in your life that you appreciate them.

paper doesn’t mean boring: check out this cheeky note from Ashley Brook Designs, perfect for sending someone a congrats message or thank you for a service performed!

But more importantly, thank you cards are pretty much at the top of the list of party etiquette. It is always appropriate to send a thank you, whether it be for a thoughtful gift or just for coming to your event; people are extremely busy and whenever somebody makes the effort to come and celebrate something with you it’s nice to let them know you appreciate that.

So that brings up an important question: how do you write a thank you card?

I was doing a little research today (i.e. shopping online) and found this great list on Indigo.ca’s Kate Spade New York page (side note, if you haven’t checked that out yet it’s a MUST, there are so many great pieces coming out it’s an incredibly exciting change for Chapters!) that I think is really helpful:

5 Tips for Writing the Perfect Thank You Card

Thank you’s should be short and sweet. But they should also be heartfelt. My favourite thing about the box of cards I found is that there are options. There are 6 thank you cards and 6 blank cards. Having some blank cards means that I can personalize my own note. If it’s a coworker’s birthday a little note with some flowers is a perfect, inexpensive and classy gift. If you have a meeting with someone send them a thank you for their time. If a friend did you a huge favour send them a little note with a Starbucks gift card with a message to grab a latte break on you.

one of my friends gave me this little note when I moved to Toronto and I kept it this whole time because it was just the sweetest gesture!

Giving thanks is one of the best ways to make sure all your guests remember your parties fondly, and with such gorgeous ways to send notes I think every Party Girl should make the extra effort to be gracious everyday 🙂

I have this horrible compulsive problem where I underestimate the time projects will take me. I know I don’t suffer alone, but sometimes I just cannot accept how horrible I am at time management. I had a million blog posts planned but I had to follow up with this year’s Thanksgiving debacle because it seemed important to share with everybody how sometimes even the best laid plans…well, you know.

As I mentioned in the last post about how I overachieve Thanksgiving every year, I said I’d contribute cranberry sangria for dinner. This seemed like an amazing idea because a) who doesn’t love wine and fruit? and b) it seemed adorably festive and appropriate. This was before I researched whether cranberry sangria was a thing of course. I just assumed that hey, its a fruit and hey, there’s a juice for that so really it’s gotta be possible.

I immediately noticed a problem upon researching recipes. Apparently cranberry sangria is some sort of fancy holiday concoction created by professional bartenders and people with a lot more alcohol skills than me. For example, as if I could find a recipe that didn’t involve brandy. What is brandy?! Finally I got tired of feeling like a total loser in the liquor store and I just put together a bunch of different recipes and worked it out. Surprisingly, Frankensteining the crap out of a bunch of alcohol has zero negative results and it tasted amazing, so I’m going to share it with you guys for your parties!

The Party Girl Cranberry Sangria

1 bottle of red wine * Side note, this sounds easy but hell it took FOREVER to find one that wouldn’t clash with all the cranberry I poured in there. I’m going to make your life a little easier because I’m a great person and say go to the California section in LCBO and track down a Zinfandel. There are a bunch that say Zinfandel White, but they’re pink. It makes zero sense and contributed to the ten whole minutes I spent staring at wine. Just don’t get that one. The best suggestion I can make is that I bought one called Dancing Bull Zinfandel and it was perfect, and didn’t seem like anything special so I’d say if you can find it in your LCBO, stick with that!

1 cup orange juice

5 cups cranberry juice * Completely of your choice, I used cranberry cocktail because I have no issue with whatever they put in it that makes it not 100% cranberries but I know some people aren’t into that so use your own preference!

1 cup (!!!) Triple Sec *Don’t judge me.

1/2 cup fresh strawberries, hulled and sliced

1 green apple, cored and sliced (you can leave the skin on or take it off, whichever!)

1/2 sliced lime

1 sliced orange

Add all the ingredients together and pop it in the fridge for at least a couple hours. I think the longer you leave it the better, and five hours is always the suggested chill time, but who has time for that? I chilled mine for about two hours before we broke it open and it was still great, and refreshing!

Anyways it was a big hit, and pretty easy once the original searching was over. One suggestion then, don’t do what I did and serve it like this:

Important tip: not all spoons are created equal.

I also decided that I couldn’t let last year’s cupcakes disappear into history along with the other nontraditional Thanksgiving desserts, so this year I decided to do some sugar cookies and decorate them. I’m going to post the recipe I use and some better tips in another blog about a birthday party I did because those cookies looked infinitely more professional, but I wanted to share these here to make all those other procrastinators feel better.

I got home around 7 (I worked until 5 and then stopped off at Target for a rolling pin, because I’d been using a wine bottle and for once didn’t have an empty wine bottle hanging around…which now that I think about it is probably embarrassing…anyways, and then Target became this huge ordeal because I have no willpower and so I was home by 7) and then baked the cookies and whipped up the icing and started to decorate around 9. Huge mistake. My motivation to draw turkeys did not extend beyond 10pm and they slowly started to look really cartoony instead of artistically magical. Not to mention my handwriting broke down around the same time and I wrote “thanks” wrong on the “give thanks” cookies about four times. So this wasn’t a huge success for my culinary portfolio (this, ladies and gents, is why hiring a caterer is never a weakness!) BUT the kids loved the cookies and everybody assumed I made them childish on purpose to appeal to all the under 5s and I just rolled with that because THAT IS WHAT PARTY PLANNERS DO, folks. I didn’t go to bed until 2am so by the time I got them there Sunday for dinner I was just grateful I was contributing anything edible.

You can really see where everything started to go downhill.

Anyways, I hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving, and don’t forget to check out our website thepartygirl.ca which should be up by the end of this week! So exciting!

With Thanksgiving approaching I decided we could start off with a holiday themed post because why not?

Last Thanksgiving my contribution to the family dinner was these adorable turkey cupcakes. I want to say that for the record they tasted amazing, but that isn’t what this post is about.

My biggest struggle when it comes to deciding on a dish to bring to any potluck situation is that I am a horrible overachiever. It wasn’t enough for me to just say “dessert”, no way. I had to take it to a whole new level and bring a themed dessert. I hate myself at times like these.

As per any creative decision, I spent like three days on Pinterest coming up with ideas. I decided on cupcakes mostly because I had found this great deal at Michael’s on a cupcake carrier and was desperate to try it out. Also who doesn’t love cupcakes?

I decided on turkey cupcakes because it seemed like the most obvious holiday theme possible, and also Thanksgiving and Halloween are so close together that beside my cupcake carrier there was a display for monster making kits and I fell in love with these monster eyes and decided on the spot they would make cute turkeys. I stand by that choice.

I bought three different colours of piped icing and a container of chocolate icing. I made vanilla cupcakes (okay being honest: from a box, don’t tell) and then iced them with the chocolate. Everything seemed like it was going really well.

Then I moved on to the part where I added the turkey’s face. So originally my plan with the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup was that it would be a sort of base for the turkey’s iced feathers. This was a horrible failure that resulted in a huge mess and two destroy cupcakes. It was crime scene worthy. So then I decided it would be the turkeys face, since I had had a similar failure making a 3D beak out of icing. So I painted on a face with icing and then used the coloured piping icing to make three rows of “feathers”, and propped the Reese’s up on a chunk of icing. It looked super precarious but they didn’t fall (not even upon delivery and/or consumption, thanks very much!) so I considered that a success.

The moral of this story is that even if you have subpar baking skills and even less patience for icing, if you’re dedicated and creative you can pull off the perfect addition to your family’s holiday party.

These guys were a major hit and I got rave reviews. It was worth the entire day I dedicated to making them (!). Did the success go to my head? Probably. I signed up to make cranberry sangria for this year.

Last weekend we celebrated Jordan’s sixth birthday! We let her pick the theme and she chose One Direction. So armed with that knowledge and one week I tried to pull together as many 1D elements as possible for our backyard pool party.

You would think that One Direction decorations would be really popular in stores right now (given they seem to be the number one choice for six year old girls these days) but actually we had a really tough time finding pre-done party ideas. So we had to get creative.

The party was on Sunday and I had the misfortune to be at work all day Saturday. I found these great little DIY One Direction paper doll patterns online and spent the day (in between answering the phone, obvs) making these little guys. I had no idea what I was going to use them for but at this point (the DAY BEFORE) I had nothing with any of the 1D faces or anything! I had struck out at every party store in the city. What is an amateur party planner to do?

I figured that a bunch of kids would love nothing more than a dessert bar so I figured I would start there. Of course this was problematic because unlike every other kid Jordan hates chocolate, so that meant everything had to be vanilla or candy. I decided for a make-your-own sundae bar and sugar cookies, in addition to a candy-stuffed piñata and a custom vanilla cake. I knew I couldn’t handle a One Direction cake but since the best bakery quote I could get for cookies was $80 for two dozen (the custom bakery cake was only $55!) I decided it was time to work my DIY skills.

I found this recipe for sugar cookies (I used the royal icing recipe on that site too, and bought a few different icing dyes from a local party store to individually dye each colour for the icing. It was a way bigger process than I thought but it was definitely worth it!) and stayed up until 1am decorating the cookies.

My novice baking skills as evidenced by how I used measuring cups to mix icing instead of actual mixing bowls. Screw technique, it’s all about results, right?

I also trashed our kitchen.

Justin picked up the cake Saturday night and we hit up Bulk Barn for sundae treats as well as ingredients for the sugar cookies and I have to say it was a major success. We spent about $30 and got a ton of goodies. I really feel like we would have spent a lot more than that if we’d just gone to the grocery store, not to mention the stress of finding meringue powder at Loblaws. Not a fun time I imagine.

I would say from this experience I learned a) if I ever make sugar cookies again I will buy a cake mixer because not only was my poor little hand mixer making some seriously concerning noises but also there was this clear smell of overheating motor that I will likely pay for later but also b) my hand hurt for days. Not just mixing but I had to hand pipe every detail of the cookies because I couldn’t find a way to just project their faces like the Internet suggested. The Internet clearly lies.

After an exhausting cookie night we woke up pretty late Sunday and had to break world records for loading stuff into the car. And our tardiness meant I spent the half hour car ride blowing up 30 balloons. Then we precariously managed to get them into the house where I sewed them together into a garland using fishing line. We strung up the garlands across the deck for a fun look!

I didn’t think to take a picture until after the party and the sun had done some damage to the balloons by late afternoon (turns out the sun WILL pop your latex balloons) but you get the picture!

All in all though it was a fun day and Jordan had a blast so really that’s all that matters!

Oh and P.S. – I managed to find the little paper dolls a home by setting up a little display with the loop bags at the front door. It was easy and they looked adorable.